This book examines British responses to disease during the Seven Years War with a particular focus on the role of the state and its relationship to the welfare of the armed forces. Alongside fiscal ...
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This book examines British responses to disease during the Seven Years War with a particular focus on the role of the state and its relationship to the welfare of the armed forces. Alongside fiscal and logistical capability, British success required consistent and well-publicized attention to the welfare of troops to maintain manpower strength, support recruitment, and retain public support and public financing for the war. The strength and success of the British state during the war is shown to be dependent on its ability to secure public support through attention to troop welfare. This was accomplished by encouraging and supporting medical research, applying medical knowledge, and adapting to local conditions around the globe. The incidence of disease thus played a crucial role in the formation of strategy and policy; in turn, the war stimulated new ways of thinking about disease and medicine, particularly in colonial environments. By tracing how imperial warfare shaped the development of British medical expertise, this book highlights the central role that the British state played in shaping eighteenth-century medicine and scientific innovation. Not only did the discipline of tropical medicine have its roots in the war, but the experience of war provided naval and military medical practitioners with the opportunity for observation and experimentation. Moreover, wartime medical experience conferred authority and status on naval and military medical practitioners. Medicine became a form of expertise in the service of the British Empire, applied during campaigning and influencing both imperial policy and the nature of imperial authority.Less

Disease, War, and the Imperial State : The Welfare of the British Armed Forces during the Seven Years' War

Erica Charters

Published in print: 2014-11-03

This book examines British responses to disease during the Seven Years War with a particular focus on the role of the state and its relationship to the welfare of the armed forces. Alongside fiscal and logistical capability, British success required consistent and well-publicized attention to the welfare of troops to maintain manpower strength, support recruitment, and retain public support and public financing for the war. The strength and success of the British state during the war is shown to be dependent on its ability to secure public support through attention to troop welfare. This was accomplished by encouraging and supporting medical research, applying medical knowledge, and adapting to local conditions around the globe. The incidence of disease thus played a crucial role in the formation of strategy and policy; in turn, the war stimulated new ways of thinking about disease and medicine, particularly in colonial environments. By tracing how imperial warfare shaped the development of British medical expertise, this book highlights the central role that the British state played in shaping eighteenth-century medicine and scientific innovation. Not only did the discipline of tropical medicine have its roots in the war, but the experience of war provided naval and military medical practitioners with the opportunity for observation and experimentation. Moreover, wartime medical experience conferred authority and status on naval and military medical practitioners. Medicine became a form of expertise in the service of the British Empire, applied during campaigning and influencing both imperial policy and the nature of imperial authority.

The broad goal of this book is to combine historical materialism and historical institutionalism through a gendered lens. Both concern how durable social structures construct and maintain asymmetries ...
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The broad goal of this book is to combine historical materialism and historical institutionalism through a gendered lens. Both concern how durable social structures construct and maintain asymmetries of power. The study pursues a concerted institutional analysis of class power and the labor process and ways that legal practices beyond the workplace impact struggles over its control. The labor contract was integral to labor control in historical capitalist development, and how labor control was accomplished through juridical authority. To do so it goes beyond current neo-marxist perspectives on labor control. The substantive analysis centers on master and servant laws in mid-Victorian England, with local and national studies. Under the law disobeying a master in a contract of service was a criminal offense. The book presents local case studies of how employers in the pottery (Hanley), fish trawling (Hull), needlemaking and agricultural (Redditch) sectors institutionalized reliance on these laws for labor control for 1864-75. They highlight how configurations of the production process, the social relations in them, the shape of labor markets, and the local organization of political and juridical power determined this path. The national analysis involves a critique and reinterpretation of Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation and his thesis of the ‘double movement’. It argues that labor remained legally embedded in society throughout most of the nineteenth century, and its relative disembedding was at the hands of labor unions, against the interests of many employers in retaining these laws. The book concludes with contemporary reflections on its broad thesis.Less

England's Great Transformation : "Law, Labor, and the Industrial Revolution"

Marc W. Steinberg

Published in print: 2016-04-21

The broad goal of this book is to combine historical materialism and historical institutionalism through a gendered lens. Both concern how durable social structures construct and maintain asymmetries of power. The study pursues a concerted institutional analysis of class power and the labor process and ways that legal practices beyond the workplace impact struggles over its control. The labor contract was integral to labor control in historical capitalist development, and how labor control was accomplished through juridical authority. To do so it goes beyond current neo-marxist perspectives on labor control. The substantive analysis centers on master and servant laws in mid-Victorian England, with local and national studies. Under the law disobeying a master in a contract of service was a criminal offense. The book presents local case studies of how employers in the pottery (Hanley), fish trawling (Hull), needlemaking and agricultural (Redditch) sectors institutionalized reliance on these laws for labor control for 1864-75. They highlight how configurations of the production process, the social relations in them, the shape of labor markets, and the local organization of political and juridical power determined this path. The national analysis involves a critique and reinterpretation of Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation and his thesis of the ‘double movement’. It argues that labor remained legally embedded in society throughout most of the nineteenth century, and its relative disembedding was at the hands of labor unions, against the interests of many employers in retaining these laws. The book concludes with contemporary reflections on its broad thesis.

Modernity in interwar Europe frequently took the form of a preoccupation with mechanizing the natural; fears and fantasies revolved around the notion that the boundaries between people and machines ...
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Modernity in interwar Europe frequently took the form of a preoccupation with mechanizing the natural; fears and fantasies revolved around the notion that the boundaries between people and machines were collapsing. Reproduction in particular became a battleground for those debating the merits of the modern world. That debate continues today and this book draws on novels, plays, science fiction, and films of the 1920s and 1930s, as well as the work of biologists, psychiatrists, and sexologists, to reveal surprisingly early debates on many of the same questions that shape the conversation today: homosexuality, recreational sex, contraception, abortion, euthanasia, sex-change operations, and in vitro fertilization. The book brings together the experience and perception of modernity with sexuality, technology, and ecological concerns into a discussion of science's place in reproduction in British and American cultural history.Less

Angus McLaren

Published in print: 2012-03-09

Modernity in interwar Europe frequently took the form of a preoccupation with mechanizing the natural; fears and fantasies revolved around the notion that the boundaries between people and machines were collapsing. Reproduction in particular became a battleground for those debating the merits of the modern world. That debate continues today and this book draws on novels, plays, science fiction, and films of the 1920s and 1930s, as well as the work of biologists, psychiatrists, and sexologists, to reveal surprisingly early debates on many of the same questions that shape the conversation today: homosexuality, recreational sex, contraception, abortion, euthanasia, sex-change operations, and in vitro fertilization. The book brings together the experience and perception of modernity with sexuality, technology, and ecological concerns into a discussion of science's place in reproduction in British and American cultural history.

The book explores the British cultural tradition of queer martyrdom that originated in the Roman and Anglican Catholic Revivals of the nineteenth century. As a devotional practice this centred on the ...
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The book explores the British cultural tradition of queer martyrdom that originated in the Roman and Anglican Catholic Revivals of the nineteenth century. As a devotional practice this centred on the envisioning of Christ as an unmarried, suffering, beautiful, queer martyr. Those who wished to purge their own sinful desires and live eternally with Him could seek idealised visions of His eroticisable body in the Mass as the reward for a life of arduous devotion. Men with such tastes might band together in communities of the like-minded. Others, who appreciated the homoerotic potential of such worship but who could not cope with the limits on lives in the Christian closet and who yearned for a wider public witness of sexual preferences rather than of self-denial, moved increasingly to alternative forms of self-expression, many of them rooted in socialism. Such people could then use queer aspects of ecclesiastical style as elements of camp or pastiche. Others remained within the space of the Churches and established a discrete niche within society sustained by their own visions of queer pain and delight. This last phenomenon helps to explain the role of the post-war Anglican Church in being instrumental in helping to bring about the partial decriminalisation of homosexual relations in England in 1967. Many in the gay liberation movement subsequently rejected the heritage of religion and yet, with tragic irony, the experience of AIDS gave a renewed prominence to older, queer traditions that were rooted in the aestheticized endurance of suffering.Less

Visions of Queer Martyrdom from John Henry Newman to Derek Jarman

Dominic Janes

Published in print: 2015-04-27

The book explores the British cultural tradition of queer martyrdom that originated in the Roman and Anglican Catholic Revivals of the nineteenth century. As a devotional practice this centred on the envisioning of Christ as an unmarried, suffering, beautiful, queer martyr. Those who wished to purge their own sinful desires and live eternally with Him could seek idealised visions of His eroticisable body in the Mass as the reward for a life of arduous devotion. Men with such tastes might band together in communities of the like-minded. Others, who appreciated the homoerotic potential of such worship but who could not cope with the limits on lives in the Christian closet and who yearned for a wider public witness of sexual preferences rather than of self-denial, moved increasingly to alternative forms of self-expression, many of them rooted in socialism. Such people could then use queer aspects of ecclesiastical style as elements of camp or pastiche. Others remained within the space of the Churches and established a discrete niche within society sustained by their own visions of queer pain and delight. This last phenomenon helps to explain the role of the post-war Anglican Church in being instrumental in helping to bring about the partial decriminalisation of homosexual relations in England in 1967. Many in the gay liberation movement subsequently rejected the heritage of religion and yet, with tragic irony, the experience of AIDS gave a renewed prominence to older, queer traditions that were rooted in the aestheticized endurance of suffering.

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